

















.** %, 



*+M 



^ V^ 



,** %, 



^0 












<0 





















A* v * 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/newrevelationOOdoyl 



THE NEW REVELATION 
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 



THE 

NEW REVELATION 



BY 



ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 

AUTHOR OF "THE BRITISH CAMPAIGN IN 
FRANCE AND FLANDERS," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



^ * A 



♦ • 



3' 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAY 24 IS 18 

/■ ■ ' 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

©CU497453 



To all the brave men and women, humble 
or learned, who have had the moral 
courage during seventy years to 
face ridicule or worldly disad- 
vantage in order to testify 
to an all-important truth 



March, 1918 



PREFACE 

Many more philosophic minds than 
mine have thought over the religious 
side of this subject and many more scientific 
brains have turned their attention to its 
phenomenal aspect. So far as I know, how- 
ever, there has been no former attempt to 
show the exact relation of the one to the 
other. I feel that if I should succeed in 
making this a little more clear I shall have 
helped in what I regard as far the most im- 
portant question with which the human race 
is concerned. 

A celebrated Psychic, Mrs. Piper, uttered 
in the year 1899 words which were recorded 
by Dr. Hodgson at the time. She was 
speaking in trance upon the future of 
spiritual religion, and she said: "In the 
next century this will be astonishingly per- 
ceptible to the minds of men. I will also 
make a statement which you will surely see 
verified. Before the clear revelation of 



Vlll 



PREFACE 



spirit communication there will be a terrible 
war in different parts of the world. The 
entire world must be purified and cleansed 
before mortal can see, through his spiritual 
vision, his friends on this side and it will 
take just this line of action to bring about 
a state of perfection. Friend, kindly think 
of this." We have had "the terrible war 
in different parts of the world." The 
second half remains to be fulfilled. 

A. C. D. 
1918. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Search 13 

II The Revelation ........ 47 

III The Coming Life 63 

IV Problems and Limitations 82 

SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS 

I The Next Phase op Life 107 

II Automatic Writing 112 

III The Cheriton Dugout 115 



THE NEW REVELATION 



THE 

NEW REVELATION 

CHAPTER I 

THE SEARCH 

The subject of psychical research is one 
upon which I have thought more and about 
which I have been slower to form my opin- 
ion, than upon any other subject whatever. 
Every now and then as one jogs along 
through life some small incident happens 
which very forcibly brings home the fact 
that time passes and that first youth and 
then middle age are slipping away. Such a 
one occurred the other day. There is a col- 
umn in that excellent little paper, Light, 
which is devoted to what was recorded on the 
corresponding date a generation — that is 
thirty years — ago. As I read over this col- 
umn recently I had quite a start as I saw 
my own name, and read the reprint of a let- 

13 



14 THE NEW REVELATION 

ter which I had written in 1887, detailing 
some interesting spiritual experience which 
had occurred in a seance. Thus it is mani- 
fest that my interest in the subject is of 
some standing, and also, since it is only 
within the last year or two that I have finally 
declared myself to be satisfied with the evi- 
dence, that I have not been hasty in forming 
my opinion. If I set down some of my ex- 
periences and difficulties my readers will 
not, I hope, think it egotistical upon my 
part, but will realise that it is the most 
graphic way in which to sketch out the 
points which are likely to occur to any other 
inquirer. When I have passed over this 
ground, it will be possible to get on to some- 
thing more general and impersonal in its 
nature. 

When I had finished my medical educa- 
tion in 1882, I found myself, like many 
young medical men, a convinced materialist 
as regards our personal destiny. I had 
never ceased to be an earnest theist, because 
it seemed to me that Napoleon's question to 
the atheistic professors on the starry night 
as he voyaged to Egypt: ""Who was it, gen- 



THE SEARCH 15 

tlemen, who made these stars?'' has never 
been answered. To say that the Universe 
was made by immutable laws only put the 
question one degree further back as to who 
made the laws. I did not, of course, believe 
in an anthropomorphic God, but I believed 
then, as I believe now, in an intelligent Force 
behind all the operations of Nature — a force 
so infinitely complex and great that my finite 
brain could get no further than its existence. 
Eight and wrong I saw also as great obvious 
facts which needed no divine revelation. 
But when it came to a question of our little 
personalities surviving death, it seemed to 
me that the whole analogy of Nature was 
against it. When the candle burns out the 
light disappears. When the electric cell is 
shattered the current stops. When the body 
dissolves there is an end of the matter. 
Each man in his egotism may feel that he 
ought to survive, but let him look, we will 
say, at the average loafer — of high or low 
degree — would anyone contend that there 
was any obvious reason why that personality 
should carry on? It seemed to be a delu- 
sion, and I was convinced that death did in- 



16 THE NEW REVELATION 

deed end all, though I saw no reason why 
that should affect our duty towards human- 
ity during our transitory existence. 

This was my frame of mind when Spir- 
itual phenomena first came before my no- 
tice. I had always regarded the subject as 
the greatest nonsense upon earth, and I had 
read of the conviction of fraudulent medi- 
ums and wondered how any sane man could 
believe such things. I met some friends, 
however, who were interested in the matter, 
and I sat with them at some table-moving 
seances. We got connected messages. I am 
afraid the only result that they had on my 
mind was that I regarded these friends with 
some suspicion. They were long messages 
very often, spelled out by tilts, and it was 
quite impossible that they came by chance. 
Someone then, was moving the table. I 
thought it was they. They probably thought 
that I did it. I was puzzled and worried 
over it, for they were not people whom I 
could imagine as cheating — and yet I could 
not see how the messages could come except 
by conscious pressure. 

About this time — it would be in 1886 — I 



THE SEARCH 17 

came across a book called The Reminiscences 
of Judge Edmunds. He was a judge of the 
U.S. High Courts and a man of high stand- 
ing. The book gave an account of how his 
wife had died, and how he had been able for 
many years to keep in touch with her. All 
sorts of details were given. I read the book 
with interest, and absolute scepticism. It 
seemed to me an example of how a hard 
practical man might have a weak side to his 
brain, a sort of reaction, as it were, against 
those plain facts of life with which he had 
to deal. Where was this spirit of which he 
talked? Suppose a man had an accident 
and cracked his skull; his whole character 
would change, and a high nature might be- 
come a low one. With alcohol or opium or 
many other drugs one could apparently 
quite change a man 's spirit. The spirit then 
depended upon matter. These were the ar- 
guments which I used in those days. I did 
not realise that it was not the spirit that was 
changed in such eases, but the body through 
which the spirit worked, just as it would be 
no argument against the existence of a mu- 
sician if you tampered with his violin so that 



18 THE NEW REVELATION 

only discordant notes could come through. 
I was sufficiently interested to continue to 
read such literature as came in my way, I 
was amazed to find what a number of great 
men — men whose names were to the fore in 
science — thoroughly believed that spirit was 
independent of matter and could survive it. 
When I regarded Spiritualism as a vulgar 
delusion of the uneducated, I could afford to 
look down upon it ; but when it was endorsed 
by men like Crookes, whom I knew to be the 
most rising British chemist, by Wallace, 
who was the rival of Darwin, and by Flam- 
marion, the best known of astronomers, I 
could not afford to dismiss it. It was all 
very well to throw down the books of these 
men which contained their mature conclu- 
sions and careful investigations, and to say 
"Well, he has one weak spot in his brain,' ' 
but a man has to be very self-satisfied if the 
day does not come when he wonders if the 
weak spot is not in his own brain. For 
some time I was sustained in my scepticism 
by the consideration that many famous men, 
such as Darwin himself, Huxley, Tyndall 
and Herbert Spencer, decided this new 



THE SEARCH 19 

branch of knowledge; but when I learned 
that their derision had reached such a point 
that they would not even examine it, and 
that Spencer had declared in so many words 
that he had decided against it on a priori 
grounds, while Huxley had said that it did 
not interest him, I was bound to admit that, 
however great they were in science, their 
action in this respect was most unscientific 
and dogmatic, while the action of those who 
studied the phenomena and tried to find out 
the law r s that governed them, was following 
the true path which has given us all human 
advance and knowledge. So far I had got 
in my reasoning, so my sceptical position 
was not so solid as before. 

It was somewhat reinforced, however, by 
my own experiences. It is to be remem- 
bered that I was working without a medium, v 
which is like an astronomer working with- 
out a telescope. I have no psychical powers 
myself, and those who worked with me had 
little more. Among us we could just muster 
enough of the magnetic force, or whatever 
you will call it, to get the table movements 
with their suspicious and often stupid mes- 



20 THE NEW REVELATION 

sages. I still have notes of those sittings 
and copies of some, at least, of the messages. 
They were not always absolutely stupid. 
For example, I find that on one occasion, on 
my asking some test question, such as how 
many coins I had in my pocket, the table 
spelt out: "We are here to educate and to 
elevate, not to guess riddles." And then: 
"The religious frame of mind, not the criti- 
cal, is what we wish to inculcate." Now, no 
one could say that that was a puerile mes- 
sage. On the other hand, I was always 
haunted by the fear of involuntary pressure 
from the hands of the sitters. Then there 
came an incident which puzzled and dis- 
gusted me very much. We had very good 
conditions one evening, and an amount of 
movement which seemed quite independent 
of our pressure. Long and detailed mes- 
sages came through, which purported to be 
from a spirit who gave his name and said 
he was a commercial traveller who had lost 
his life in a recent fire at a theatre at Exeter. 
All the details were exact, and he implored 
us to write to his family, who lived, he said, 
at a place called Slattenmere, in Cumber- 



THE SEARCH 21 

land. I did so, but my letter came back, ap- 
propriately enough, through the dead letter 
office. To this day I do not know whether 
we were deceived, or whether there was some 
mistake in the name of the place ; but there 
are the facts, and I was so disgusted that for 
some time my interest in the whole subject 
waned. It was one thing to study a subject, 
but when the subject began to play elab- 
orate practical jokes it seemed time to call a 
halt. If there is such a place as Slatten- 
mere in the world I should even now be glad 
to know it. ' 

I was in practice in Southsea at this time, 
and dwelling there was General Drayson, 
a man of very remarkable character, and 
one of the pioneers of Spiritualism in this 
country. To him I went with my difficulties, 
and he listened to them very patiently. He 
made light of my criticism of the foolish na- 
ture of many of these messages, and of the 
absolute falseness of some. "You have 
not got the fundamental truth into your 
head," said he. "That truth is, that every 
spirit in the flesh passes over to the next 
world exactly as it is, with no change what- 



m THE NEW REVELATION 

ever. This world is full of weak or foolish 
people. So is the next. You need not mix 
with them, any more than you do in this 
world. One chooses one's companions. 
But suppose a man in this world, who had 
lived in his house alone and never mixed 
with his fellows, was at last to put his head 
out of the window to see what sort of place 
it was, what would happen ? Some naughty 
boy would probably say something rude. 
Anyhow, he would see nothing of the wisdom 
or greatness of the world. He would draw 
his head in thinking it was a very poor place. 
That is just what you have done. In a 
mixed seance, with no definite aim, you 
have thrust your head into the next world 
and you have met some naughty boys. Go 
forward and try to reach something better.'' 
That was General Dray son's explanation, 
and though it did not satisfy me at the time, 
I think now that it was a rough approxima- 
tion to the truth. These were my first steps 
in Spiritualism. I was still a sceptic, but at 
least I was an inquirer, and when I heard 
some old-fashioned critic saying that there 
was nothing to explain, and that it was all 



THE SEARCH 23 

fraud, or that a conjuror was needed to show 
it up, I knew at least that that was all non- 
sense. It is true that my own evidence up 
to then was not enough to convince me, but 
my reading, which was continuous, showed 
me how deeply other men had gone into it, 
and I recognised that the testimony was so 
strong that no other religious movement in 
the world could put forward anything to 
compare with it. That did not prove it to be 
true, but at least it proved that it must 
be treated with respect and could not be 
brushed aside. Take a single incident of 
what Wallace has truly called a modern mir- 
acle. I choose it because it is the most in- 
credible. I allude to the assertion that D. 
D. Home — who, by the way, was not, as is 
usually supposed, a paid adventurer, but was 
the nephew of the Earl of Home — the asser- 
tion, I say, that he floated out of one window 
and into another at the height of seventy feet 
above the ground. I could not believe it. 
And yet, when I knew that the fact was at- 
tested by three eye-witnesses, who were Lord 
Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, and Captain 
Wynne, all men of honour and repute, who 



24 THE NEW REVELATION 

were willing afterwards to take their oath 
upon it, I could not but admit that the evi- 
dence for this was more direct than for any 
of those far-off events which the whole world 
has agreed to accept as true. 

I still continued during these years to hold 
table seances, which sometimes gave no re- 
sults, sometimes trivial ones, and sometimes 
rather surprising ones. I have still the 
notes of these sittings, and I extract here the 
results of one which were definite, and which 
were so unlike any conceptions which I held 
of life beyond the grave that they amused 
rather than edified me at the time. I find 
now, however, that they agree very closely 
with the revelations in Raymond and in 
other later accounts, so that I view them with 
different eyes. I am aware that all these ac- 
counts of life beyond the grave differ in de- 
tail — I suppose any of our accounts of the 
present life would differ in detail — but in the 
main there is a very great resemblance, 
which in this instance was very far from the 
conception either of myself or of either of 
the two ladies who made up the circle. Two 
communicators sent messages, the first of 



THE SEARCH 25 

whom spelt out as a name " Dorothy Poth- 
lethwaite," a name unknown to any of us. 
She said she died at Melbourne five years be- 
fore, at the age of sixteen, that she was now 
happy, that she had work to do, and that 
she had been at the same school as one of the 
ladies. On my asking that lady to raise her 
hands and give a succession of names, the 
table tilted at the correct name of the head 
mistress of the school. This seemed in the 
nature of a test. She went on to say that the 
sphere she inhabited was all round the earth ; 
that she knew about the planets ; that Mars 
was inhabited by a race more advanced than 
us, and that the canals were artificial; there 
was no bodily pain in her sphere, but there 
could be mental anxiety; they were gov- 
erned ; they took nourishment ; she had been 
a Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had 
not fared better than the Protestants ; there 
were Buddhists and Mohammedans in her 
sphere, but all fared alike; she had never 
seen Christ and knew no more about Him 
than on earth, but believed in His influence ; 
spirits prayed and they died in their new 
sphere before entering another; they had 



26 THE NEW REVELATION 

pleasures — music was among them. It was 
a place of light and of laughter. She added 
that they had no rich or poor, and that the 
general conditions were far happier than on 
earth. 

This lady bade us good-night, and immedi- 
ately the table was seized by a much more 
robust influence, which dashed it about very 
violently. In answer to my questions it 
claimed to be the spirit of one whom I will 
call Dodd, who was a famous cricketer, and 
with whom I had some serious conversation 
in Cairo before he went up the Mle, where 
he met his death in the Dongolese Expedi- 
tion. We have now, I may remark, come to 
the year 1896 in my experiences. Dodd was 
not known to either lady. I began to ask 
him questions exactly as if he were seated 
before me, and he sent his answers back with 
great speed and decision. The answers were 
often quite opposed to what I expected, so 
that I could not believe that I was influenc- 
ing them. He said that he was happy, that 
he did not wish to return to earth. He had 
been a free-thinker, but had not suffered in 
the next life for that reason. Prayer, how- 



THE SEARCH 27 

ever, was a good thing, as keeping us in touch 
with the spiritual world. If he had prayed 
more he would have been higher in the spirit 
world. 

This, I may remark, seemed rather in con- 
flict with his assertion that he had not suf- 
fered through being a free-thinker, and yet, 
of course, many men neglect prayer who are 
not free-thinkers. 

His death was painless. He remembered 
the death of Polwhele, a young officer who 
died before him. When he (Dodd) died he 
had found people to welcome him, but Pol- 
whele had not been among them. 

He had work to do. He was aware of the 
Fall of Dongola, but had not been present 
in spirit at the banquet at Cairo afterwards. 
He knew more than he did in life. He re- 
membered our conversation in Cairo. Du- 
ration of life in the next sphere was shorter 
than on earth. He had not seen General 
Gordon, nor any other famous spirit. 
Spirits lived in families and in communi- 
ties. Married people did not necessarily 
meet again, but those who loved each other 
did meet again. 



28 THE NEW REVELATION 

I have given this synopsis of a communi- 
cation to show the kind of thing we got — 
though this was a very favourable specimen, 
both for length and for coherence* It shows 
that it is not just to say, as many eritics 
say, that nothing but folly comes through. 
There was no folly here unless we call every- 
thing folly which does not agree with pre- 
conceived ideas. On the other hand, what 
proof was there that these statements were 
true ? I could see no such proof, and they 
simply left me bewildered. Now, with a 
larger experience, in which I find that the 
same sort of information has come to very 
many people independently in many lands, 
I think that the agreement of the witnesses 
does, as in all cases of evidence, constitute 
some argument for their truth. At the time 
I could not fit such a conception of the future 
world into my own scheme of philosophy, 
and I merely noted it and passed on. 

I continued to read many books upon the 
subject and to appreciate more and more 
what a cloud of witnesses existed, and how 
careful their observations had been. This 
impressed by mind very much more than the 



THE SEARCH 29 

limited phenomena which came within the 
reach of our circle. Then or afterwards I 
read a book by Monsieur Jacolliot upon oc- 
cult phenomena in India. Jacolliot was 
Chief Judge of the French Colony of Cran- 
denagur, with a very judicial mind, but 
rather biassed against spiritualism. He 
conducted a series of experiments with na- 
tive fakirs, who gave him their confidence 
because he was a sympathetic man and 
spoke their language. He describes the 
pains he took to eliminate fraud. To cut a 
long story short he found among them every 
phenomenon of advanced European medi- 
umship, everything which Home, for ex- 
ample, had ever done. He got levitation of 
the body, the handling of fire, movement of 
articles at a distance, rapid growth of plants, 
raising of tables. Their explanation of these 
phenomena was that they were done by the 
Pitris or spirits, and their only difference 
in procedure from ours seemed to be that 
they made more use of direct evocation. 
They claimed that these powers were handed 
down from time immemorial and traced back 
to the Chaldees. All this impressed me very 



30 THE NEW REVELATION 

much, as here, independently, we had ex- 
actly the same results, without any question 
of American frauds, or modern vulgarity, 
which were so often raised against similar 
phenomena in Europe. 

My mind was also influenced about this 
time by the report of the Dialectical Society, 
although this Report had been presented as 
far back as 1869. It is a very cogent paper, 
and though it was received with a chorus of 
ridicule by the ignorant and materialistic 
papers of those days, it was a document of 
great value. The Society was formed by a 
number of people of good standing and open 
mind to enquire into the physical phenomena 
of Spiritualism. A full account of their ex- 
periences and of their elaborate precautions 
against fraud are given. After reading the 
evidence, one fails to see how they could have 
come to any other conclusion than the one 
attained, namely, that the phenomena were 
undoubtedly genuine, and that they pointed 
to laws and forces which had not been ex- 
plored by Science. It is a most singular 
fact that if the verdict had been against spir- 
itualism, it would certainly have been hailed 



THE SEARCH 31 

as the death blow of the movement, whereas 
being an endorsement of the phenomena it 
met with nothing by ridicule. This has been 
the fate of a number of inquiries since those 
conducted locally at Hydesville in 1848, or 
that which followed when Professor Hare 
of Philadelphia, like Saint Paul, started 
forth to oppose but was forced to yield to 
the truth. 

About 1891, I had joined the Psychical 
Research Society and had the advantage of 
reading all their reports. The world owes 
a great deal to the unwearied diligence of the 
Society, and to its sobriety of statement, 
though I will admit that the latter makes 
one impatient at times, and one feels that in 
their desire to avoid sensationalism they dis- 
courage the world from knowing and using 
the splendid work which they are doing. 
Their semi-scientific terminology also chokes 
off the ordinary reader, and one might say 
sometimes after reading their articles what 
an American trapper in the Rocky Moun- 
tains said to me about some University man 
whom he had been escorting for the season. 
He was that clever, " he said, "that you 



u 



32 THE NEW REVELATION 

could not understand what lie said." But 
in spite of these little peculiarities all of us 
who have wanted light in the darkness have 
found it by the methodical, never-tiring 
work of the Society. Its influence was one 
of the powers which now helped me to shape 
my thoughts. There was another, however, 
which made a deep impression upon me. Up 
to now I had read all the wonderful experi- 
ences of great experimenters, but I had 
never come across any effort upon their part 
to build up some system which would cover 
and contain them all. Now I read that mon- 
umental book, Myers ' Human Personality, 
a great root book from which a whole tree 
of knowledge will grow. In this book 
Myers was unable to get any formula which 
covered all the phenomena called "spirit- 
ual," but in discussing that action of mind 
upon mind which he has himself called telep- 
athy he completely proved his point, and he 
worked it out so thoroughly with so many 
examples, that, save for those who were wil- 
fully blind to the evidence, it took its place 
henceforth as a scientific fact. But this was 



THE SEARCH 33 

an enormous advance. If mind could act 
upon mind at a distance, then there were 
some human powers which were quite dif- 
ferent to matter as we had always under- 
stood it. The ground was cut from under 
the feet of the materialist, and my old posi- 
tion had been destroyed. I had said that 
the flame could not exist when the candle 
was gone. But here was the flame a long 
way off the candle, acting upon its own. The 
analogy was clearly a false analogy. If the 
mind, the spirit, the intelligence of man 
could operate at a distance from the body, 
then it was a thing to that extent separate 
from the body. Why then should it not 
exist on its own when the body was de- 
stroyed? Not only did impressions come 
from a distance in the case of those who were 
just dead, but the same evidence proved that 
actual appearances of the dead person came 
with them, showing that the impressions 
were carried by something which was ex- 
actly like the body, and yet acted independ- 
ently and survived the death of the body. 
The chain of evidence between the simplest 



34 THE NEW REVELATION 

cases of thought-reading at one end, and the 
actual manifestation of the spirit independ- 
ently of the body at the other, was one un- 
broken chain, each phase leading to the 
other, and this fact seemed to me to bring 
the first signs of systematic science and order 
into what had been a mere collection of be- 
wildering and more or less unrelated facts. 
About this time I had an interesting ex- 
perience, for I was one of three delegates 
sent by the Psychical Society to sit up in a 
haunted house. It was one of these polter- 
geist cases, where noises and foolish tricks 
had gone on for some years, very much like 
the classical case of John Wesley's family 
at Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox 
family at Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, 
which was the starting-point of modern 
spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of 
our journey, and yet it was not entirely bar- 
ren. On the first night nothing occurred. 
On the second, there were tremendous noises, 
sounds like someone beating a table with a 
stick. We had, of course, taken every pre- 
caution, and we could not explain the noises ; 
but at the same time we could not swear that 



THE SEARCH 35 

some ingenious practical joke had not been 
played upon us. There the matter ended for 
the time. Some years afterwards, however, 
I met a member of the family who occupied 
the house, and he told me that after our visit 
the bones of a child, evidently long buried, 
had been dug up in the garden. You must 
admit that this was very remarkable. 
Haunted houses are rare, and houses with 
buried human beings in their gardens are 
also, we will hope, rare. That they should 
have both united in one house is surely some 
argument for the truth of the phenomena. 
It is interesting to remember that in the case 
of the Fox family there was also some word 
of human bones and evidence of murder be- 
ing found in the cellar, though an actual 
crime was never established. I have little 
doubt that if the Wesley family could have 
got upon speaking terms with their perse- 
cutor, they would also have come upon some 
motive for the persecution. It almost seems 
as if a life cut suddenly and violently short 
had some store of unspent vitality which 
could still manifest itself in a strange, mis- 
chievous fashion. Later I had another sin- 



36 THE NEW REVELATION 

gular personal experience of this sort which 
I may describe at the end of this argument. 1 
From this period until the time of the 
War I continued in the leisure hours of a 
very busy life to devote attention to this sub- 
ject. I had experience of one series of 
seances with very amazing results, including 
several materializations seen in dim light. 
As the medium was detected in trickery 
shortly afterwards I wiped these off entirely 
as evidence. At the same time I think that 
the presumption is very clear, that in the 
case of some mediums like Eusapia Palla- 
dino they may be guilty of trickery when 
their powers fail them, and yet at other 
times have very genuine gifts. Mediumship 
in its lowest forms is a purely physical gift 
with no relation to morality and in many 
cases it is intermittent and cannot be con- 
trolled at will. Eusapia was at least twice 
convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, 
whereas she several times sustained long ex- 
aminations under every possible test condi- 
tion at the hands of scientific committees 
which contained some of the best names of 

i Vide Appendix III. 



THE SEARCH 37 

France, Italy, and England. However, I 
personally prefer to cut my experience with 
a discredited medium out of my record, and 
I think that all physical phenomena pro- 
duced in the dark must necessarily lose much 
of their value, unless they are accompanied 
by evidential messages as well. It is the cus- 
tom of our critics to assume if you cut 
out the mediums who got into trouble you 
would have to cut out nearly all your evi- 
dence. That is not so at all. Up to the time 
of this incident I had never sat with a pro- 
fessional medium at all, and yet I had cer- 
tainly accumulated some evidence. The 
greatest medium of all, Mr. D. D. Home, 
showed his phenomena in broad daylight, 
and was ready to submit to every test and no 
charge of trickery was ever substantiated 
against him. So it was with many others. 
It is onlv fair to state in addition that when 
a public medium is a fair mark for notoriety 
hunters, for amateur detectives and for sen- 
sational reporters, and when he is dealing 
with obscure elusive phenomena and has to 
defend himself before juries and judges who, 
as a rule, know nothing about the conditions 



38 THE NEW REVELATION 

which influence the phenomena, it would be 
wonderful if a man could get through with- 
out an occasional scandal. At the same time 
the whole system of paying by results, which 
is practically the present system, since if a 
medium never gets results he would soon get 
no payments, is a vicious one. It is only 
when the professional medium can be guar- 
anteed an annuity which will be independent 
of results, that we can eliminate the strong 
temptation to substitute pretended phenom- 
ena when the real ones are wanting. 

I have now traced my own evolution of 
thought up to the time of the War. I can 
claim, I hope, that it was deliberate and 
showed no traces of that credulity with 
which our opponents charge us. It was too 
deliberate, for I was culpably slow in throw- 
ing any small influence I may possess into 
the scale of truth. I might have drifted on 
for my whole life as a psychical Eesearcher, 
showing a sympathetic, but more or less dil- 
ettante attitude towards the whole subject, 
as if we were arguing about some imper- 
sonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis 
or the Baconian controversy. But the War 



THE SEARCH 39 

came, and when the War came it brought 
earnestness into all our souls and made us 
look more closely at our own beliefs and re- 
assess their values. In the presence of an 
agonized world, hearing every day of the 
deaths of the flower of our race in the first 
promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing 
around one the wives and mothers who had 
no clear conception whither their loved ones 
had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that 
this subject with which I had so long dallied 
was not merely a study of a force outside the 
rules of science, but that it was really some- 
thing tremendous, a breaking down of the 
walls between two worlds, a direct undeni- 
able message from beyond, a call of hope and 
of guidance to the human race at the time of 
its deepest affliction. The objective side of 
it ceased to interest for having made up one's 
mind that it was true there was an end of 
the matter. The religious side of it was 
clearly of infinitely greater importance. 
The telephone bell is in itself a very childish 
affair, but it may be the signal for a very 
vital message. It seemed that all these phe- 
nomena, large and small, had been the tele- 



40 THE NEW REVELATION 

phone bells which, senseless in themselves, 
had signalled to the human race: "Bouse 
yourselves! Stand by! Be at attention! 
Here are signs for you. They will lead up 
to the message which God wishes to send." 
It was the message not the signs which really 
counted. A new revelation seemed to be in 
the course of delivery to the human race, 
though how far it was still in what may be 
called the John-the-Baptist stage, and How 
far some greater fulness and clearness might 
be expected hereafter, was more than any 
man can say. My point is, that the physi- 
cal phenomena which have been proved up to 
the hilt for all who care to examine the evi- 
dence, are really of no account, and that their 
real value consists in the fact that they sup- 
port and give objective reality to an im- 
mense body of knowledge which must deeply 
modify our previous religious views, and 
must, when properly understood and digest- 
ed, make religion a very real thing, no longer 
a matter of faith, but a matter of actual ex- 
perience and fact. It is to this side of the 
question that I will now turn, but I must add 
to my previous remarks about personal ex- 



THE SEARCH 41 

perience that, since the War, I have had 
some very exceptional opportunities of con- 
firming all the views which I had already 
formed as to the truth of the general facts 
upon which my views are founded. 

These opportunities came through the fact 
that a lady who lived with us, a Miss L. S., 
developed the power of automatic writing. 
Of all forms of mediumship, this seems to 
me to be the one which should be tested most 
rigidly, as it lends itself very easily not so 
much to deception as to self-deception, which 
is a more subtle and dangerous thing. Is 
the lady herself writing, or is there, as she 
avers, a power that controls her, even as the 
chronicler of the Jews in the Bible averred 
that he was controlled? In the case of L. 
S. there is no denying that some messages 
proved to be not true — especially in the mat- 
ter of time they were quite unreliable. But 
on the other hand, the numbers which did 
come true were far beyond what any guess- 
ing or coincidence could account for. Thus, 
when the Lusitania was sunk and the morn- 
ing papers here announced that so far as 
known there was no loss of life, the medium 



42 THE NEW REVELATION 

at once wrote: "It is terrible, terrible — 
and will have a great influence on the war." 
Since it was the first strong impulse which 
turned America towards the war, the mes- 
sage was true in both respects. Again, she 
foretold the arrival of an important tele- 
gram upon a certain day, and even gave the 
name of the deliverer of it — a most unlikely- 
person. Altogether, no one could doubt the 
reality of her inspiration, though the lapses 
were notable. It was like getting a good 
message through a very imperfect telephone. 
One other incident of the early war days 
stands out in my memory. A lady in whom 
I was interested had died in a provincial 
town. She was a chronic invalid and mor- 
phia was found by her bedside. There was 
an inquest with an open verdict. Eight days 
later I went to have a sitting with Mr. Vout 
Peters. After giving me a good deal which 
was vague and irrelevant, he suddenly said : 
" There is a lady here. She is leaning upon 
an older woman. She keeps saying ' Mor- 
phia.' Three times she has said it. Her 
mind was clouded. She did not mean it. 
Morphia!" Those were almost his exact 



THE SEARCH 43 

words. Telepathy was out of the question, 
for I had entirely other thoughts in my mind 
at the time and was expecting no such mes- 
sage. 

Apart from personal experienced, this 
movement must gain great additional solid- 
ity from the wonderful literature which has 
sprung up around it during the last few 
years. If no other spiritual books were in 
existence than five which have appeared in 
the last year or so — I allude to Professor 
Lodge's Raymond, Arthur Hill's Psychical 
Investigations, Professor Crawford's Real- 
ity of Psychical Phenomena, Professor Bar- 
rett 's Threshold of the Unseen, and Gerald 
Balfour's Ear of Dionysius — those five alone 
would, in my opinion, be sufficient to estab- 
lish the facts for any reasonable enquirer. 

Before going into this question of a new 
religious revelation, how it is reached, and 
what it consists of, I would say a word upon 
one other subject. There have always been 
two lines of attack by our opponents. The 
one is that our facts are not true. This I 
have dealt with. The other is that we are 
upon forbidden ground and should come off 



44 THE NEW REVELATION 

it and leave it alone. As I started from a 
position of comparative materialism, this ob- 
jection has never had any meaning for me, 
but to others I would submit one or two con- 
siderations. The chief is that God has given 
us no power at all which is under no circum- 
stances to be used. The fact that we possess 
it is in itself proof that it is our bounden 
duty to study and to develop it. It is true 
that this, like every other power, may be 
abused if we lose our general sense of pro- 
portion and of reason. But I repeat that its 
mere possession is a strong reason why it is 
lawful and binding that it be used. 

It must also be remembered that this cry 
of illicit knowledge, backed by more or less 
appropiate texts, has been used against every 
advance of human knowledge. It was used 
against the new astronomy, and Galileo had 
actually to recant. It was used against Gal- 
vani and electricity. It was used against 
Darwin, who would certainly have been 
burned had he lived a few centuries before. 
It was even used against Simpson's use of 
chloroform in child-birth, on the ground that 
the Bible declared "in pain shall ye bring 



THE SEARCH 45 

them forth. " Surely a plea which has been 
made so often, and so often abandoned, can- 
not be regarded very seriously. 

To those, however, to whom the theologi- 
cal aspect is still a stumbling block, I would 
recommend the reading of two short books, 
each of them by clergymen. The one is the 
Eev. Fielding Ould's Is Spiritualism of the 
Devil, purchasable for twopence ; the other is 
the Eev, Arthur Chambers' Our Self After 
Death. I can also recommend the Eev. 
Charles Tweedale's writings upon the sub- 
ject. I may add that when I first began to 
make public my own views, one of the first 
letters of sympathy which I received was 
from the late Archdeacon Wilberf orce. 

There are some theologians who are not 
only opposed to such a cult, but who go the 
length of saying that the phenomena and 
messages come from friends who personate 
our dead, or pretend to be heavenly teachers. 
It is difficult to think that those who hold 
this view have ever had any personal experi- 
ence of the consoling and uplifting effect of 
such communications upon the recipient. 
Euskin has left it on record that his convic- 



46 THE NEW REVELATION 

tion of a future life came from Spiritualism, 
though he somewhat ungrateful^ and illog- 
ically added that having got that, he wished 
to have no more to do with it. There are 
many, however — quorum pars parva sum — 
who without any reserve can declare that 
they were turned from materialism to a be- 
lief in future life, with all that that implies, 
by the study of this subject. If this be the 
devil's work one can only say that the devil 
seems to be a very bungling workman and 
to get results very far from what he might 
be expected to desire. 



CHAPTER II 

THE REVELATION" 

I can now turn with some relief to a more 
impersonal view of this great subject. Al- 
lusion has been made to a body of fresh doc- 
trine. Whence does this come? It comes 
in the main through automatic writing 
where the hand of the human medium is con- 
trolled, either by an alleged dead human be- 
ing, as in the case of Miss Julia Ames, or 
by an alleged higher teacher, as in that of Mr. 
Stainton Moses. These written communi- 
cations are supplemented by a vast number 
of trance utterances, and by the verbal mes- 
sages of spirits, given through the lips of 
mediums. Sometimes it has even come by 
direct voices, as in the numerous cases de- 
tailed by Admiral Usborne Moore in his book 
The Voices. Occasionally it has come 
through the family circle and table-tilting, 
as, for example, in the two cases I have pre- 

47 



48 THE NEW REVELATION 

viously detailed within my own experience. 
Sometimes, as in a case recorded by Mrs. de 
Morgan, it has come through the hand of a 
child. 

Now, of course, we are at once confronted 
with the obvious objection — how do we know 
that these messages are really from beyond % 
How do we know that the medium is not con- 
sciously writing, or if that be improbable, 
that he or she is unconsciously writing them 
by his or her own higher self? This is a 
perfectly just criticism, and it is one which 
we must rigorously apply in every case, 
since if the whole world is to become full of 
minor prophets, each of them stating their 
own views of the religious state with no 
proof save their own assertion, we should, 
indeed, be back in the dark ages of implicit 
faith. The answer must be that we require 
signs which we can test before we accept as- 
sertions which we cannot test. In old days 
they demanded a sign from a prophet, and it 
was a perfectly reasonable request, and still 
holds good. If a person comes to me with an 
account of life in some further world, and 
has no credentials save his own assertion, I 



THE REVELATION 49 

would rather have it in my waste-paper- 
basket than on my study table. Life is too 
short to weigh the merits of such produc- 
tions. But if, as in the case of Stainton 
Moses, with his Spirit Teachings, the doc- 
trines which are said to come from beyond 
are accompanied with a great number of ab- 
normal gifts — and Stainton Moses was one 
of the greatest mediums in all ways that 
England has ever produced — then I look 
upon the matter in a more serious light. 
Again, if Miss Julia Ames can tell Mr. Stead 
things in her own earth life of which he 
could not have cognisance, and if those 
things are shown, when tested, to be true, 
then one is more inclined to think that those 
things which cannot be tested are true also. 
Or once again, if Raymond can tell us of a 
photograph no copy of which had reached 
England, and which proved to be exactly as 
he described it, and if he can give us, through 
the lips of strangers, all sorts of details of 
his home life, which his own relatives had to 
verify before they found them to be true, is 
it unreasonable to suppose that he is fairly 
accurate in his description of his own ex- 



50 THE NEW REVELATION 

periences and state of life at the very mo- 
ment at which he is communicating? Or 
when Mr. Arthur Hill receives messages 
from folk of whom he never heard, and 
afterwards verifies that they are true in 
every detail, is it not a fair inference that 
they are speaking truths also when they give 
any light upon their present condition f The 
cases are manifold, and I mention only a 
few of them, but my point is that the whole 
of this system, from the lowest physical phe- 
nomenon of a table-rap up to the most in- 
spired utterance of a prophet, is one com- 
plete whole, each link attached to the next 
one, and that when the humbler end of that 
chain was placed in the hand of humanity, it 
was in order that they might, by diligence 
and reason, feel their way up it until they 
reached the revelation which waited in the 
end. Do not sneer at the humble begin- 
nings, the heaving table or the flying tam- 
bourine, however much such phenomena 
may have been abused or simulated, but re- 
member that a falling apple taught us grav- 
ity, a boiling kettle brought us the steam en- 
gine, and i the twitching leg of a frog opened 



THE REVELATION 51 

up the train of thought and experiment 
which gave us electricity. So the lowly 
manifestations of Hydesville have ripened 
into results which have engaged the finest 
group of intellects in this country during the 
last twenty years, and which are destined, in 
my opinion, to bring about far the greatest 
development of human experience which the 
world has ever seen, 

It has been asserted by men for whose 
opinion I have a deep regard — notably by 
Sir William Barratt — that psychical re- 
search is quite distinct from religion. Cer- 
tainly it is so, in the sense that a man 
might be a very good psychical researcher 
but a very bad man. But the results of 
psychical research, the deductions which we 
may draw, and the lessons we may learn, 
teach us of the continued life of the soul, of 
the nature of that life, and of how it is in- 
fluenced by our conduct here. If this is dis- 
tinct from religion, I must confess that I do 
not understand the distinction. To me it is 
religion — the very essence of it. But that 
does not mean that it will necessarily crystal- 
lise into a new religion. Personally I trust 



52 THE NEW REVELATION 

that it will not do so. Surely we are dis- 
united enough already ? Rather would I see 
it the great unifying force, the one provable 
thing connected with every religion, Chris- 
tian or non-Christian, forming the common 
solid basis upon which each raises, if it must 
needs raise, that separate system which ap- 
peals to the varied types of mind. The 
Southern races will always demand what is 
less austere than the North, the West will 
always be more critical than the East. One 
cannot shape all to a level conformity. But 
if the broad premises which are guaranteed 
by this teaching from beyond are accepted, 
then the human race has made a great stride 
towards religious peace and unity. The 
question which faces us, then, is how will this 
influence bear upon the older organised re- 
ligions and philosophies which have influ- 
enced the actions of men. 

The answer is, that to only one of these re- 
ligions or philosophies is this new revelation 
absolutely fatal. That is to Materialism. I 
do not say this in any spirit of hostility to 
Materialists, who, so far as they are an or- 
ganized body, are, I think, as earnest and 



THE REVELATION 53 

moral as any other class. But the fact is 
manifest that if spirit can live without mat- 
ter, then the foundation of Materialism is 
gone, and the whole scheme of thought 
crashes to the ground. 

As to other creeds, it must be admitted that 
an acceptance of the teaching brought to us 
from beyond would deeply modify conven- 
tional Christianity. But these modifica- 
tions would be rather in the direction of ex- 
planation and development than of contra- 
diction. It would set right grave misunder- 
standings which have always offended the 
reason of every thoughtful man, but it would 
also confirm and make absolutely certain the 
fact of life after death, the base of all re- 
ligion. It would confirm the unhappy re- 
sults of sin, though it would show that those 
results are never absolutely permanent. It 
would confirm the existence of higher beings, 
whom we have called angels, and of an ever- 
ascending hierarchy above us, in which the 
Christ spirit finds its place, culminating in 
heights of the infinite with which we asso- 
ciate the idea of all-power or of God. It 
would confirm the idea of heaven and of a 



54 THE NEW REVELATION 

temporary penal state which corresponds to 
purgatory rather than to hell. Thus this 
new revelation, on some of the most vital 
points, is not destructive of the beliefs, and 
it should be hailed by really earnest men of 
all creeds as a most powerful ally rather than 
a dangerous devil-begotten enemy. 

On the other hand, let us turn to the points 
in which Christianity must be modified by 
this new revelation. 

First of all I would say this, which must 
be obvious to many, however much they de- 
plore it : Christianity must change or must 
perish. That is the law of life — that things 
must adapt themselves or perish. Chris- 
tianity has deferred the change very long, 
she has deferred it until her churches are 
half empty, until women are her chief sup- 
porters, and until both the learned part of 
the community on one side, and the poorest 
class on the other, both in town and country, 
are largely alienated from her. Let us try 
and trace the reason for this. It is appar- 
ent in all sects, and comes, therefore, from 
some deep common cause. 



THE REVELATION 55 

People are alienated because they frankly 
do not believe the facts as presented to 
them to be true. Their reason and their 
sense of justice are equally offended. One 
can see no justice in a vicarious sacrifice, nor 
in the God who could be placated by such 
means. Above all, many cannot understand 
such expressions as the "redemption from 
sin/ 9 "cleansed by the blood of the Lamb," 
and so forth. So long as there was any ques- 
tion of the fall of man there was at least some 
sort of explanation of such phrases ; but 
when it became certain that man had never 
fallen — when with ever fuller knowledge we 
could trace our ancestral course down 
through the cave-man and the drift-man, 
back to that shadowy and far-off time when 
the man-like ape slowly evolved into the ape- 
like man — looking back on all this vast suc- 
cession of life, we knew that it had always 
been rising from step to step. Never was 
there any evidence of a fall. But if there 
were no fall, then what became of the atone- 
ment, of the redemption, of original sin, of 
a large part of Christian mystical philoso- 



56 THE NEW REVELATION 

phy ? Even if it were as reasonable in itself 
as it is actually unreasonable, it would still 
be quite divorced from the facts. 

Again, too much seemed to be made of 
Christ's death. It is no uncommon thing to 
die for an idea. Every religion has equally 
had its martyrs. Men die continually for 
their convictions. Thousands of our lads 
are doing it at this instant in France. 
Therefore the death of Christ, beautiful as 
it is in the Gospel narrative, has seemed to 
assume an undue importance, as though it 
were an isolated phenomenon for a man to 
die in pursuit of a reform. In my opinion, 
far too much stress has been laid upon 
Christ's death, and far too little upon His 
life. That was where the true grandeur and 
the true lesson lay. It was a life which even 
in those limited records shows us no trait 
which is not beautiful — a life full of easy 
tolerance for others, of kindly charity, of 
broad-minded moderation, of gentle courage, 
always progressive and open to new ideas, 
and yet never bitter to those ideas which He 
was really supplanting, though He did oc- 
casionally lose His temper with their more 



THE REVELATION 57 

bigoted and narrow supporters. Especially 
one loves His readiness to get at the spirit 
of religion, sweeping aside the texts and the 
forms. Never had anyone such a robust 
common sense, or such a sympathy for weak- 
ness. It was this most wonderful and un- 
common life, and not his death, which is the 
true centre of the Christian religion. 

Now, let us look at the light which we get 
from the spirit guides upon this question of 
Christianity. Opinion is not absolutely uni- 
form yonder, any more than it is here ; but 
reading a number of messages upon this sub- 
ject, they amount to this : There are many 
higher spirits with our departed. They 
vary in degree. Call them " angels," and 
you are in touch with old religious thought. 
High above all these is the greatest spirit of 
whom they have cognizance — not God, since 
God is so infinite that He is not within their 
ken — but one who is nearer God and to that 
extent represents God. This is the Christ 
Spirit. His special care is the earth. He 
came down upon it at a time of great earthly 
depravity — a time when the world was al- 
most as wicked as it is now, in order to give 



58 THE NEW REVELATION 

the people the lesson of an ideal life. Then 
he returned to his own high station, having 
left an example which is still occasionally 
followed. That is the story of Christ as 
spirits have described it. There is nothing 
here of Atonement or Redemption. But 
there is a perfectly feasible and reasonable 
scheme, which I, for one, could readily be- 
lieve. 

If such a view of Christianity were gen- 
erally accepted, and if it were enforced by 
assurance and demonstration from the New 
Eevelation which is coming to us from the 
other side, then we should have a creed which 
might unite the churches, which might be 
reconciled to science, which might defy all 
attacks, and which might carry the Christian 
Faith on for an indefinite period. Eeason 
and Faith would at last be reconciled, a 
nightmare would be lifted from our minds, 
and spiritual peace would prevail. I do not 
see such results coming as a sudden conquest 
or a violent revolution. Rather will it come 
as a peaceful penetration, as some crude 
ideas, such as the Eternal Hell idea, have 
already gently faded away within our own 



THE REVELATION 59 

lifetime. It is, however, when the human 
soul is ploughed and harrowed by suffering 
that the seeds of truth may be planted, and 
so some future spiritual harvest will surely 
rise from the days in which we live. 

When I read the New Testament with the 
knowledge which I have of Spiritualism, I 
am left with a deep conviction that the 
teaching of Christ was in many most im- 
portant respects lost by the early Church, 
and has not come down to us. All these al- 
lusions to a conquest over death have, as it 
seems to me, little meaning in the present 
Christian philosophy, whereas for those who 
have seen, however dimly, through the veil, 
and touched, however slightly, the out- 
stretched hands beyond, death has indeed 
been conquered. When we read so many 
references to the phenomena with which we 
are familiar, the levitations, the tongues of 
fire, the rushing wind, the spiritual gifts, the 
working of wonders, we feel that the central 
fact of all, the continuity of life and the com- 
munication with the dead, was most certainly 
known. Our attention is arrested by such a 
saying as: "Here he worked no wonders 



60 THE NEW REVELATION 

because the people were wanting in faith." 
Is this not absolutely in accordance with 
psychic law as we know it? Or when Christ, 
on being touched by the sick woman, said: 
"Who has touched me? Much virtue has 
passed out of me." Could He say more 
clearly what a healing medium would 
say now, save that He would use the word 
" power" instead of " virtue"; or when we 
read: "Try the spirits whether they be of 
God," is it not the very advice which would 
now be given to a novice approaching a 
seance % It is too large a question for me to 
do more than indicate, but I believe that this 
subject, which the more rigid Christian 
churches now attack so bitterly, is really the 
central teaching of Christianity itself. To 
those who would read more upon this line of 
thought, I strongly recommend Dr. Abraham 
Wallace's Jesus of Nazareth, if this valuable 
little work is not out of print. He demon- 
strates in it most convincingly that Christ's 
miracles were all within the powers of 
psychic law as we now understand it, and 
were on the exact lines of such law even in 
small details. Two examples have already 



THE REVELATION 61 

been given. Many are worked out in that 
pamphlet. One which convinced me as a 
truth was the thesis that the story of the ma- 
terialization of the two prophets upon the 
mountain was extraordinarily accurate 
when judged by psychic law. There is the 
fact that Peter, James and John (who 
formed the psychic circle when the dead was 
restored to life, and were presumably the 
most helpful of the group) were taken. 
Then there is the choice of the high pure air 
of the mountain, the drowsiness of the at- 
tendant mediums, the transfiguring, the shin- 
ing robes, the cloud, the words: "Let us 
make three tabernacles," with its alternate 
reading : ' ' Let us make three booths or cab- 
inets" (the ideal way of condensing power 
and producing materializations) — all these 
make a very consistent theory of the nature 
of the proceedings. For the rest, the list of 
gifts which St. Paul gives as being necessary 
for the Christian Disciple, is simply the list 
of gifts of a very powerful medium, includ- 
ing prophecy, healing, causing miracles (or 
physical phenomena) , clairvoyance, and 
other powers (I Corinth, xii, 8, 11). The 



62 THE NEW REVELATION 

early Christian Church was saturated with 
spiritualism, and they seem to have paid no 
attention to those Old Testament prohibi- 
tions which were meant to keep these powers 
only for the use and profit of the priesthood. 



CHAPTER III 

THE COMING LIFE 

Now, leaving this large and possibly con- 
tentious subject of the modifications which 
such new revelations must produce in Chris- 
tianity, let us try to follow what occurs to 
man after death. The evidence on this point 
is fairly full and consistent. Messengers 
from the dead have been received in many 
lands at various times, mixed up with a good 
deal about this world, which we could verify. 
When messages come thus, it is only fair, I 
think, to suppose that if what we can test is 
true, then what we cannot test is true also. 
When in addition we find a very great uni- 
formity in the messages and an agreement 
as to details which are not at all in accord- 
ance with any pre-existing scheme of 
thought, then I think the presumption of 
truth is very strong. It is difficult to think 
that some fifteen or twenty messages from 

63 



64 THE NEW REVELATION 

various sources of which I have personal 
notes, all agree, and yet are all wrong, nor is 
it easy to suppose that spirits can tell the 
truth 'about our world but untruth about 
their own. 

I received lately, in the same week, two 
accounts of life in the next world, one re- 
ceived through the hand of the near relative 
of a high dignitary of the Church, while the 
other came through the wife of a working 
mechanician in Scotland. Neither could 
have been aware of the existence of the other, 
and yet the two accounts are so alike as to be 
practically the same. 1 

The message upon these points seems to 
me to be infinitely reassuring, whether we 
regard our own fate or that of our friends. 
The departed all agree that passing is usu- 
ally both easy and painless, and followed by 
an enormous reaction of peace and ease. 
The individual finds himself in a spirit body, 
which is the exact counterpart of his old one, 
save that all disease, weakness, or deformity 
has passed from it. This body is standing 
or floating beside the old body, and conscious 

i Vide Appendix II. 



THE COMING LIFE 65 

both of it and of the surrounding people. 
At this moment the dead man is nearer to 
matter than he will ever be again, and hence 
it is that at that moment the greater part of 
those cases occur where, his thoughts having 
turned to someone in the distance, the spirit 
body went with the thoughts and was mani- 
fest to the person. Out of some 250 cases 
carefully examined by Mr. Gurney, 134 of 
such apparitions were actually at this mo- 
ment of dissolution, when one could imagine 
that the new spirit body was possibly so far 
material as to be more visible to a sympa- 
thetic human eye than it would later become. 
These cases, however, are very rare in 
comparison with the total number of deaths. 
In most cases I imagine that the dead man 
is too preoccupied with his own amazing ex- 
perience to have much thought for others. 
He soon finds, to his surprise, that though 
he endeavours to communicate with those 
whom he sees, his ethereal voice and his 
ethereal touch are equally unable to make 
any impression upon those human organs 
which are only attuned to coarser stimuli. 
It is a fair subject for speculation, 



66 THE NEW REVELATION 

whether a fuller knowledge of those light 
rays which we know to exist on either side 
of the spectrum, or of those sounds which 
we can prove by the vibrations of a dia- 
phragm to exist, although they are too high 
for mortal ear, may not bring us some 
further psychical knowledge. Setting that 
aside, however, let us follow the fortunes 
of the departing spirit. He is presently 
aware that there are others in the room 
besides those who were there in life, and 
among these others, who seem to him as sub- 
stantial as the living, there appear familiar 
faces, and he finds his hand grasped or his 
lips kissed by those whom he had loved and 
lost. Then in their company, and with the 
help and guidance of some more radiant be- 
ing who has stood by and waited for the new- 
comer, he drifts to his own surprise through 
all solid obstacles and out upon his new life. 
This is a definite statement, and this is 
the story told by one after the other with a 
consistency which impels belief. It is al- 
ready very different from any old theology. 
The Spirit is not a glorified angel or goblin 
damned, but it is simply the person himself, 



THE COMING LIFE 67 

containing all his strength and wealoaess, his 
wisdom and his folly, exactly as he has re- 
tained his personal appearance. We can 
well believe that the most frivolous and fool- 
ish would be awed into decency by so tre- 
mendous an experience, but impressions soon 
become blunted, the old nature may soon re- 
assert itself in new surroundings, and the 
frivolous still survive, as our seance rooms 
can testify. 

And now, before entering upon his new 
life, the new Spirit has a period of sleep 
which varies in its length, sometimes hardly 
existing at all, at others extending for weeks 
or months. Eaymond said that his lasted 
for six days. That was the period also in a 
case of which I had some personal evidence. 
Mr. Myers, on the other hand, said that he 
had a very prolonged period of unconscious- 
ness. I could imagine that the length is reg- 
ulated by the amount of trouble or mental 
preoccupation of this life, the longer rest giv- 
ing the better means of wiping this out. 
Probably the little child would need no such 
interval at all. This, of course, is pure spec- 
ulation, but there is a considerable consensus 



68 THE NEW REVELATION 

of opinion as to the existence of a period of 
oblivion after the first impression of the new 
life and before entering upon its duties. 

Having wakened from this sleep, the spirit 
is weak, as the child is weak after earth 
birth. Soon, however, strength returns and 
the new life begins. This leads us to the 
consideration of heaven and hell. Hell, I 
may say, drops out altogether, as it has long 
dropped out of the thoughts of every reason- 
able man. This odious conception, so blas- 
phemous in its view of the Creator, arose 
from the exaggerations of Oriental phrases, 
and may perhaps have been of service in a 
coarse age where men were frightened by 
fires, as wild beasts are scared by the travel- 
lers. | Hell as a permanent place does not 
exist. But the idea of punishment, of puri- 
fying chastisement, in fact of Purgatory, is 
justified by the reports from the other side. 
Without such punishment there could be no 
justice in the Universe, for how impossible it 
would be to imagine that the fate of a Ras- 
putin is the same as that of a Father Damien. 
The punishment is very certain and very 
serious, though in its less severe forms it 



THE COMING LIFE 69 

only consists in the fact that the grosser 
souls are in lower spheres with a knowledge 
that their own deeds have placed them there, 
but also with the hope that expiation and the 
help of those above them will educate them 
and bring them level with the others. In 
this saving process the higher spirits find 
part of their employment. Miss Julia Ames 
in her beautiful posthumous book, says in 
memorable words: "The greatest joy of 
Heaven is emptying Hell." 

Setting aside those probationary spheres, 
which should perhaps rather be looked upon 
as a hospital for weakly souls than as a penal 
community, the reports from the other world 
are all agreed as to the pleasant conditions 
of life in the beyond. They agree that like 
goes to like, 7 that all who love or who have 
interests in common are united, that life is 
full of interest and of occupation, and that 
they would by no means desire to return. 
All of this is surely tidings of great joy, and 
I repeat that it is not a vague faith or hope, 
but that it is supported by all the laws of 
evidence which agree that where many inde- 
pendent witnesses give a similar account, 



70 THE NEW REVELATION 

that account has a claim to be considered a 
true one. If it were an account of glorified 
souls purged instantly from all human weak- 
ness and of a constant ecstasy of adoration 
round the throne of the all powerful, it might 
well be suspected as being the mere reflec- 
tion of that popular theology which all the 
mediums had equally received in their youth. 
It is, however, very different to any pre- 
existing system. It is also supported, as I 
have already pointed out, not merely by the 
consistency of the accounts, but by the fact 
that the accounts are the ultimate product 
of a long series of phenomena, all of which 
have been attested as true by those who have 
carefully examined them. 

In connection with the general subject of 
life after death, people may say we have got 
this knowledge already through faith. But 
faith, however beautiful in the individual, 
has always in collective bodies been a very 
two-edged quality. All would be well if 
every faith were alike and the intuitions of 
the human race were constant. We know 
that it is not so. Faith means to say that 
you entirely believe a thing which you cannot 



THE COMING LIFE 71 



prove. One man says : ' ' My faith is this" 
Another says : "My faith is that." Neither 
can prove it, so they wrangle for ever, either 
mentally or in the old days physically. If 
one is stronger than the other, he is inclined 
to persecute him just to twist him round to 
the true faith. Because Philip the Second's 
faith was strong and clear he, quite logically, 
killed a hundred thousand Lowlanders in the 
hope that their fellow countrymen would be 
turned to the all-important truth. Now, if 
it were recognised that it is by no means vir- 
tuous to claim what you could not prove, we 
should then be driven to observe facts, to rea- 
son from them, and perhaps reach common 
agreement. That is why this psychical 
movement appears so valuable. Its feet are 
on something more solid than texts or tradi- 
tions or intuitions. It is religion from the 
double point of view of both worlds up to 
date, instead of the ancient traditions of one 
world. 

We cannot look upon this coming world 
as a tidy Dutch garden of a place which is 
so exact that it can easily be described. It 
is probable that those messengers who come 



72 THE NEW REVELATION 

back to us are all, more or less, in one state 
ol development and represent the same 
waVe.of life as it recedes from our shores. 
Communications usually come from those 
who have not long passed over, and tend to 
grow fainter, as one would expect. It is 
instructive in this respect to notice that 
Christ's reappearances to his disciples or to 
Paul, are said to have been within a very 
few years of his death, and that there is no 
claim among the early Christians to have 
seen him later. The cases of spirits who 
give good proof of authenticity and yet have 
passed some time are not common. There 
is, in Mr. Dawson Koger's life, a very good 
case of a spirit who called himself Manton, 
and claimed to have been born at Lawrence 
Lydiard and buried at Stoke Newington in 
1677. It was clearly shown afterwards that 
there was such a man, and that he was 
Oliver Cromwell's chaplain. So far as my 
own reading goes, this is the oldest spirit 
who is on record as returning, and generally 
they are quite recent. Hence, one gets all 
one's views from the one generation, as it 
were, and we cannot take them as final, but 



THE COMING LIFE 73 

only as partial. How spirits may see things 
in a different light as they progress in the 
other world is shown by Miss Julia Ames, 
who was deeply impressed at first by the 
necessity of forming a bureau of communica- 
tion, but admitted, after fifteen years, that 
not one spirit in a million among the main 
body upon the further side ever wanted to 
communicate with us at all since their own 
loved ones had come over. She had been 
misled by the fact that when she first passed 
over everyone she met was newly arrived like 
herself. 

Thus the account we give may be partial, 
but still such as it is it is very consistent and 
of extraordinary interest, since it refers to 
our own destiny and that of those we love. 
All agree that life beyond is for a limited 
period, after which they pass on to yet other 
phases, but apparently there is more com- 
munication between these phases than there 
is between us and Spiritland. The lower 
cannot ascend, but the higher can descend at 
will. The life has a close analogy to that of 
this world at its best, Tt is pre-eminently a 
life of the mind, as this is of the body. Pre- 



74 THE NEW REVELATION 

occupations of food, money, lust, pain, etc., 
are of the body and are gone. Music, the 
Arts, intellectual and spiritual knowledge, 
and progress have increased. The people 
are clothed, as one would expect, since there 
is no reason why modesty should disappear 
with our new forms. These new forms are 
the absolute reproduction of the old ones at 
their best, the young growing up and the old 
reverting until all come to the normal. 
People live in communities, as one would ex- 
pect if like attracts like, and the male spirit 
still finds his true mate though there is no 
sexuality in the grosser sense and no child- 
birth. Since connections still endure, and 
those in the same state of development keep 
abreast, one would expect that nations are 
still roughly divided from each other, though 
language is no longer a bar, since thought 
has become a medium of conversation. How 
close is the connection between kindred souls 
over there is shown by the way in which 
Myers, Gurney and Eoden Noel, all friends 
and co-workers on earth, sent messages to- 
gether through Mrs. Holland, who knew 
none of them, each message being character- 



THE COMING LIFE 75 

istic to those who knew the men in life — or 
the way in which Professor Verrall and Pro- 
fessor Butcher, both famous Greek scholars, 
collaborated to produce the Greek problem 
which has been analysed by Mr. Gerald Bal- 
four in The Ear of Dionysius, with the re- 
sult that that excellent authority testified 
that the effect could have been attained by 
no other entities, save only Verrall and 
Butcher. It may be remarked in passing 
that these and other examples show clearly 
either that the spirits have the use of an ex- 
cellent reference library or else that they 
have memories which produce something like 
omniscience. No human memory could pos- 
sibly carry all the exact quotations which 
occur in such communications as The Ear of 
Dionysius. 

These, roughly speaking, are the lines of 
the life beyond in its simplest expression, for 
it is not all simple, and we catch dim 
glimpses of endless circles below descending 
into gloom and endless circles above, ascend- 
ing into glory, all improving, all purposeful, 
all intensely alive. All are agreed that no 
religion upon earth has any advantage over 



76 THE NEW REVELATION 

another, but that character and refinement 
are everything. At the same time, all are 
also in agreement that all religions which in- 
culcate prayer, and an upward glance rather 
than eyes for ever on the level, is good. In 
this sense, and in no other — as a help to 
spiritual life — every form may have a pur- 
pose for somebody. If to twirl a brass cylin- 
der forces the Thibetan to admit that there 
is something higher than his mountains, and 
more precious that his yaks, then to that ex- 
tent it is good. We must not be censorious 
in such matters. 

There is one point which may be men- 
tioned here which is at first startling and 
yet must commend itself to our reason when 
we reflect upon it. This is the constant as- 
sertion from the other side that the newly 
passed do not know that they are dead, and 
that it is a long time, sometimes a very long 
time, before they can be made to understand 
it. All of them agree that this state of be- 
wilderment is harmful and retarding to the 
spirit, and that some knowledge of the actual 
truth upon this side is the only way to make 
sure of not being dazed upon the other. 



THE COMING LIFE 77 

Finding conditions entirely different from 
anything for which either scientific or re- 
ligions teaching had prepared them, it is no 
wonder that they look upon their new sensa- 
tions as some strange dream, and the more 
rigidly orthodox have been their views, the 
more impossible do they find it to accept 
these new surroundings with all that, they 
imply. For this reason, as well as for many 
others, this new revelation is a very needful 
thing for mankind. A smaller point of 
practical importance is that the aged should 
realise that it is still worth while to improve 
their minds, for though they have no time 
to use their fresh knowledge in this world it 
will remain as part of their mental outfit in 
the next. 

As to the smaller details of this life be- 
yond, it is better perhaps not to treat them, 
for the very good reason that they are small 
details. We will learn them all soon for 
ourselves, and it is only vain curiosity which 
leads us to ask for them now. One thing 
is clear: there are higher intelligences over 
yonder to whom synthetic chemistry, which 
not only makes the substance but moulds the 



78 THE NEW REVELATION 

form, is a matter of absolute ease. We see 
them at work in the coarser media, percept- 
ible to our material senses, in the seance 
room. If they can build up simulacra in the 
seance room, how much may we expect 
them to do when they are working upon 
ethereal objects in that ether which is their 
own medium. It may be said generally that 
they can make something which is analogous 
to anything which exists upon earth. How 
they do it may well be a matter of guess and 
speculation among the less advanced spirits, 
as the phenomena of modern science are a 
matter of guess and speculation to us. If 
one of us were suddenly called up by the 
denizen of some sub-human world, and were 
asked to explain exactly what gravity is, or 
what magnetism is, how helpless we should 
be ! We may put ourselves in the position, 
then, of a young engineer soldier like Eay- 
mond Lodge, who tries to give some theory 
of matter in the beyond — a theory which is 
very likely contradicted by some other spirit 
who is also guessing at things above him. 
He may be right, or he may be wrong, but 
he is doing his best to say what he thinks, as 



THE COMING LIFE 79 

we should do in similar case. He believes 
that his transcendental chemists can make 
anything, and that even such unspiritual 
matter as alcohol or tobacco could come 
within their powers and could still be craved 
for by unregenerate spirits. This has 
tickled the critics to such an extent that one 
would really think to read the comments that 
it was the only statement in a book which 
contains 400 closely-printed pages. Ray- 
mond may be right or wrong, but the only 
thing which the incident proves to me is the 
unflinching courage and honesty of the man 
who chronicled it, knowing well the handle 
that he was giving to his enemies. 

There are many who protest that this 
world which is described to us is too mate- 
rial for their liking. It is not as they would 
desire it. Well, there are many things in 
this world which seem different from what 
we desire, but they exist none the less. But 
when we come to examine this charge of ma- 
terialism and try to construct some sort 
of system which would satisfy the idealists, 
it becomes a very difficult task. Are we to 
be mere wisps of gaseous happiness floating 



80 THE NEW REVELATION 

about in the air ? That seems to be the idea. 
But if there is no body like our own, and 
if there is no character like our own, then 
say what you will, we have become extinct. 
What is it to a mother if some impersonal 
glorified entity is shown to her? She will 
say, "that is not the son I lost — I want his 
yellow hair, his quick smile, his little moods 
that I know so well." That is what she 
wants ; that, I believe, is what she will have ; 
but she will not have them by any system 
which cuts us away from all that reminds us 
of matter and takes us to a vague region of 
floating emotions. 

There is an opposite school of critics 
which rather finds the difficulty in pictur- 
ing a life which has keen perceptions, robust 
emotions, and a solid surrounding all con- 
structed in so diaphanous a material. Let 
us remember that everything depends upon 
its comparison with the things around it. 

If we could conceive a world a thousand 
times denser, heavier and duller than this 
world, we can clearly see that to its inmates 
it would seem much the same as this, since 
their strength and texture would be in pro- 



THE COMING LIFE 81 

portion. If, however, these inmates came 
in contact with us, they would look upon us 
as extraordinarily airy beings living in a 
strange, light, spiritual atmosphere. They 
would not remember that we also, since our 
beings and our surroundings are in harmony 
and in proportion to each other, feel and act 
exactly as they do. 

We have now to consider the case of yet 
another stratum of life, which is as much 
above us as the leaden community would be 
below us. To us also it seems as if these 
people, these spirits, as we call them, live the 
lives of vapour and of shadows. We do not 
recollect that there also everything is in pro- 
portion and in harmony so that the spirit 
scene or the spirit dwelling, which might 
seem a mere dream thing to us, is as actual 
to the spirit as are our own scenes or our 
own dwellings, and that the spirit body is as 
real and tangible to another spirit as ours to 
our friends. 



CHAPTER IV 

PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 

Leaving for a moment the larger argu- 
ment as to the lines of this revelation and 
the broad proofs of its validity, there are 
some smaller points which have forced them- 
selves upon my attention during the con- 
sideration of the subject. This home of our 
dead seems to be very near to us — so near 
that we continually, as they tell us, visit 
them in our sleep. Much of that quiet resig- 
nation which we have all observed in people 
who have lost those whom they loved — peo- 
ple who would in our previous opinion have 
been driven mad by such loss — is due to the 
fact that they have seen their dead, and that 
although the switch-off is complete and they 
can recall nothing whatever of the spirit ex- 
perience in sleep, the soothing result of it is 
still carried on by the subconscious self. 
The switch-off is, as I say, complete, but 
sometimes for some reason it is hung up for 

82 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 83 

a fraction of a second, and it is at such mo- 
ments that the dreamer comes back from his 
dream " trailing clouds of glory.' ' From 
this also come all those prophetic dreams 
many of which are well attested. I have 
had a recent personal experience of one 
which has not yet perhaps entirely justified 
itself but is even now remarkable. Upon 
April 4th of last year, 1917, 1 awoke with a 
feeling that some communication had been 
made to me of which I had only carried back 
one word which was ringing in my head. 
That word was "Piave." To the best of 
my belief I had never heard the word be- 
fore. As it sounded like the name of a place 
I went into my study the moment I had 
dressed and I looked up the index of my 
Atlas. There was "Piave" sure enough, 
and I noted that it was a river in Italy some 
forty miles behind the front line, which at 
that time was victoriously advancing. I 
could imagine few more unlikely things 
than that the war should roll back to the 
Piave, and I could not think how any mili- 
tary event of consequence could arise there, 
but none the less I was so impressed that I 



84 THE NEW REVELATION 

drew up a statement that some such event 
would occur there, and I had it signed by my 
secretary and witnessed by my wife with the 
date, April 4th, attached. It is a matter of 
history how six months later the whole 
Italian line fell back, how it abandoned suc- 
cessive positions upon rivers, and how it 
stuck upon this stream which was said by 
military critics to be strategically almost un- 
tenable. If nothing more should occur (I 
write upon February 20th, 1918), the refer- 
ence to the name has been fully justified, 
presuming that some friend in the beyond 
was forecasting the coming events of the 
war. I have still a hope, however, that more 
was meant, and that some crowning victory 
of the Allies at this spot may justify still 
further the strange way in which the name 
was conveyed to my mind. 

People may well cry out against this 
theory of sleep on the grounds that all the 
grotesque, monstrous and objectionable 
dreams which plague us cannot possibly 
come from a high source. On this point I 
have a very definite theory, which may per- 
haps be worthy of discussion. I consider 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 85 

that there are two forms of dreams, and only 
two, the experiences of the released spirit, 
and the confused action of the lower facul- 
ties which remain in the body when the 
spirit is absent. The former is rare and 
beautiful, for the memory of it fails us. The 
latter are common and varied, but usually 
fantastic or ignoble. By noting what is ab- 
sent in the lower dreams one can tell what 
the missing qualities are, and so judge what 
part of us goes to make up the spirit. Thus 
in these dreams humour is wanting, since we 
see things which strike us afterwards as 
ludicrous, and are not amused. The sense 
of proportion and of judgment and of aspir- 
ation is all gone. In short, the higher is 
palpably gone, and the lower, the sense of 
fear, of sensual impression, of self-preser- 
vation, is functioning all the more vividly 
because it is relieved from the higher 
control. 

The limitations of the powers of spirits is 
a subject which is brought home to one in 
these studies. People say, "If they exist 
why don't they do this or that?" The an- 
swer usually is that they can't. They ap- 



86 THE NEW REVELATION 

pear to have very fixed limitations like 
our own. This seemed to be very clearly 
brought out in the cross-correspondence ex- 
periments where several writing mediums 
were operating at a distance quite inde- 
pendently of each other, and the object was 
to get agreement which was beyond the reach 
of coincidence. The spirits seem to know 
exactly what they impress upon the minds 
of the living, but they do not know how far 
they carry their instruction out. Their 
touch with us is intermittent. Thus, in the 
cross-correspondence experiments we con- 
tinually have them asking, "Did you get 
that?" or "Was it all right?" Sometimes 
they have partial cognisance of what is done, 
as where Myers says: "I saw the circle, 
but was not sure about the triangle." It is 
everywhere apparent that their spirits, even 
the spirits of those who, like Myers and 
Hodgson, were in specially close touch with 
psychic subjects, and knew all that could 
be done, were in difficulties when they de- 
sired to get cognisance of a material thing, 
such as a written document. Only, I should 
imagine, by partly materialising themselves 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 87 

could they do so, and they may not have had 
the power of self -materialization. This con- 
sideration throws some light upon the fa- 
mous case, so often used by our opponents, 
where Myers failed to give some word or 
phrase which had been left behind in a 
sealed box. Apparently he could not see 
this document from his present position, and 
if his memory failed him he would be very 
likely to go wrong about it. 

Many mistakes may, I think, be explained 
in this fashion. It has been asserted from 
the other side, and the assertion seems to me 
reasonable, that when they speak of their 
own conditions they are speaking of what 
they know and can readily and surely dis- 
cuss; but that when we insist (as we must 
sometimes insist) upon earthly tests, it drags 
them back to another plane of things, and 
puts them in a position which is far more 
difficult, and liable to error. 

Another point which is capable of being 
used against us is this: The spirits have 
the greatest difficulty in getting names 
through to us, and it is this which makes 
many of their communications so vague and 



88 THE NEW REVELATION 

unsatisfactory. They will talk all round a 
thing, and yet never get the name which 
would clinch the matter. There is an ex- 
ample of the point in a recent communi- 
cation in Light, which describes how a 
young officer, recently dead, endeavoured to 
get a message through the direct voice 
method of Mrs. Susannah Harris to his fa- 
ther. He could not get his name through. 
He was able, however, to make it clear that 
his father was a member of the Kildare 
Street Club in Dublin. Inquiry found the 
father, and it was then learned that the fa- 
ther had already received an independent 
message in Dublin to say that an inquiry was 
coming through from London. I do not 
know if the earth name is a merely ephem- 
eral thing, quite disconnected from the per- 
sonality, and perhaps the very first thing to 
be thrown aside. That is, of course, possi- 
ble. Or it may be that some law regulates 
our intercourse from the other side by which 
it shall not be too direct, and shall leave 
something to our own intelligence. 

This idea, that there is some law which 
makes an indirect speech more easy than a 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 89 

direct one, is greatly Home out by the cross- 
correspondences, where circumlocution con- 
tinually takes the place of assertion. Thus, 
in the St. Paul correspondence, which is 
treated in the July pamphlet of the S.P.R., 
the idea of St. Paul was to be conveyed from 
one automatic writer to two others, both of 
whom were at a distance, one of them in 
India. Dr. Hodgson was the spirit who 
professed to preside over this experiment. 
You would think that the simple words "St. 
Paul" occurring in the other scripts would 
be all-sufficient. But no; he proceeds to 
make all sorts of indirect allusions, to talk 
all round St. Paul in each of the scripts, and 
to make five quotations from St. Paul's writ- 
ings. This is beyond coincidence, and quite 
convincing, but none the less it illustrates 
the curious way in which they go round in- 
stead of going straight. If one could imag- 
ine some wise angel on the other side saying, 
"Now, don't make it too easy for these peo- 
ple. Make them use their own brains a lit- 
tle. They will become mere automatons if 
we do everything for them" — if we could 
imagine that, it would just cover the case. 



90 THE NEW REVELATION 

Whatever the explanation, it is a noteworthy- 
fact. 

There is another point about spirit com- 
munications which is worth noting. This is 
their uncertainty wherever any time element 
comes in. Their estimate of time is almost 
invariably wrong. Earth time is probably 
a different idea to spirit time, and hence the 
confusion. We had the advantage, as I 
have stated, of the presence of a lady in our 
household who developed writing medium- 
ship. She was in close touch with three 
brothers, all of whom had been killed in the 
war. This lady, conveying messages from 
her brothers, was hardly ever entirely wrong 
upon facts, and hardly ever right about time. 
There was one notable exception, however, 
which in itself is suggestive. Although her 
prophecies as to public events were weeks 
or even months out, she in one case foretold 
the arrival of a telegram from Africa to the 
day. Now the telegram had already been 
sent, but was delayed, so that the inference 
seems to be that she could foretell a course 
of events which had actually been set in mo- 
tion, and calculate how long they would take 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 91 

to reach their end. On the other hand, I am 
bound to admit that she confidently prophe- 
sied the escape of her fourth brother, who 
was a prisoner in Germany, and that this 
was duly fulfilled. On the whole I preserve 
an open mind upon the powers and limita- 
tions of prophecy. 

But apart from all these limitations we 
have, unhappily, to deal with absolute cold- 
blooded lying on the part of wicked or mis- 
chievous intelligences. Everyone who has 
investigated the matter has, I suppose, met 
with examples of wilful deception, which oc- 
casionally are mixed up with good and true 
communications. It was of such messages, 
no doubt, that the Apostle wrote when he 
said: " Beloved, believe not every spirit, 
but try the spirits whether they are of God." 
These words can only mean that the early 
Christians not only practised Spiritualism 
as we understand it, but also that they were 
faced by the same difficulties. There is 
nothing more puzzling than the fact that one 
may get a long connected description with 
every detail given, and that it may prove to 
be entirely a concoction. However, we must 



93 THE NEW REVELATION 

bear in mind that if one case comes abso- 
lutely correct, it atones for many failures, 
just as if you had one telegram correct you 
would know that there was a line and a com- 
municator, however much they broke down 
afterwards. But it must be admitted that 
it is very discomposing and makes one scep- 
tical of messages until they are tested. Of 
a kin with these false influences are all the 
Miltons who cannot scan, and Shelleys who 
cannot rhyme, and Shakespeares who can- 
not think, and all the other absurd imper- 
sonations which make our cause ridiculous. 
They are, I think, deliberate frauds, either 
from this side or from the other, but to say 
that they invalidate the whole subject is as 
senseless as to invalidate our own world be- 
cause we encounter some unpleasant people. 
One thing I can truly say, and that is, that 
in spite of false messages, I have never in 
all these years known a blasphemous, an un- 
kind, or an obscene message. Such inci- 
dents must be of very exceptional nature. I 
think also that, so far as allegations concern- 
ing insanity, obsession, and so forth go, they 
are entirely imaginary. Asylum statistics 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 93 

do not bear out such assertions, and me- 
diums live to as good an average age as any- 
one else. I think, however, that the cult of 
the seance may be very much overdone. 
When once you have convinced yourself of 
the truth of the phenomena the physical 
seance has done its work, and the man or 
woman who spends his or her life in run- 
ning from seance to seance is in danger of 
becoming a mere sensation hunter. Here, 
as in other cults, the form is in danger of 
eclipsing the real thing, and in pursuit of 
physical proofs one may forget that the real 
object of all these things is, as I have tried 
to point out, to give us assurance in the fu- 
ture and spiritual strength in the present, 
to attain a due perception of the passing 
nature of matter and the all-importance of 
that which is immaterial. 

The conclusion, then, of my long search 
after truth, is that in spite of occasional 
fraud, which Spiritualists deplore, and in 
spite of wild imaginings, which they dis- 
courage, there remains a great solid core in 
this movement which is infinitely nearer to 
positive proof than any other religious de- 



94 THE NEW REVELATION 

velopment with which I am acquainted. As 
I have shown, it would appear to be a re- 
discovery rather than an absolutely new 
thing, but the result in this material age is 
the same. The days are surely passing 
when the mature and considered opinions of 
such men as Crookes, Wallace, Mammarion, 
Chas. Eichet, Lodge, Barrett, Lombroso, 
Generals Drayson and Turner, Sergeant 
Ballantyne, W. T. Stead, Judge Edmunds, 
Admiral Usborne Moore, the late Archdea- 
con Wilberforce, and such a cloud of other 
witnesses, can be dismissed with the empty 
"All rot" or "Nauseating drivel" formulae. 
As Mr. Arthur Hill has well said, we have 
reached a point where further proof is su- 
perfluous, and where the weight of disproof 
lies upon those who deny. The very people 
who clamour for proofs have as a rule never 
taken the trouble to examine the copious 
proofs which already exist. Each seems to 
think that the whole subject should begin 
de novo because he has asked for informa- 
tion. The method of our opponents is to 
fasten upon the latest man who has stated 
the case — at the present instant it happens 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 95 

to be Sir Oliver Lodge — and then to deal 
with him as if he had come forward with 
some new opinions which rested entirely 
upon his own assertion, with no reference to 
the corroboration of so many independent 
workers before him. This is not an honest 
method of criticism, for in every case the 
agreement of witnesses is the very root of 
conviction. But as a matter of fact, there 
are many single witnesses upon whom this 
case could rest. If, for example, our only 
knowledge of unknown forces depended 
upon the researches of Dr. Crawford of Bel- 
fast, who places his amateur medium in a 
weighing chair with her feet from the 
ground, and has been able to register a dif- 
ference of weight of many pounds, corre- 
sponding with the physical phenomena pro- 
duced, a result which he has tested and re- 
corded in a true scientific spirit of caution, 
I do not see how it could be shaken. The 
phenomena are and have long been firmly 
established for every open mind. One feels 
that the stage of investigation is passed, and 
that of religious construction is overdue. 
For are we to satisfy ourselves by observ- 



96 THE NEW REVELATION 

ing phenomena with no attention to what 
the phenomena mean, as a group of savages 
might stare at a wireless installation with 
no appreciation of the messages coming 
through it, or are we resolutely to set our- 
selves to define these subtle and elusive ut- 
terances from beyond, and to construct from 
them a religious scheme, which will be 
founded upon human reason on this side and 
upon spirit inspiration upon the other? 
These phenomena have passed through the 
stage of being a parlour game ; they are now 
emerging from that of a debatable scientific 
novelty; and they are, or should be, taking 
shape as the foundations of a definite system 
of religious thought, in some ways confirma- 
tory of ancient systems, in some ways en- 
tirely new. The evidence upon which this 
system rests is so enormous that it would 
take a very considerable library to contain 
it, and the witnesses are not shadowy people 
living in the dim past and inaccessible to our 
cross-examination, but are our own contem- 
poraries, men of character and intellect 
whom all must respect. The situation may, 
as it seems to me, be summed up in a simple 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 97 

alternative. The one supposition is that 
there has been an outbreak of lunacy extend- 
ing over two generations of mankind, and 
two great continents — a lunacy which assails 
men or women who are otherwise eminently 
sane. The alternative supposition is that 
in recent years there has come to us from 
divine sources a new revelation which con- 
stitutes by far the greatest religious event 
since the death of Christ (for the Eeforma- 
tion was a re-arrangement of the old, not a 
revelation of the new), a revelation which 
alters the whole aspect of death and the fate 
of man. Between these two suppositions 
there is no solid position. Theories of fraud 
or of delusion will not meet the evidence. 
It is absolute lunacy or it is a revolution in 
religious thought, a revolution which gives 
us as by-products an utter fearlessness of 
death, and an immense consolation when 
those who are dear to us pass behind the veil. 
I should like to add a few practical words 
to those who know the truth of what I say. 
We have here an enormous new develop- 
ment, the greatest in the history of mankind. 
How are we to use it? We are bound in 



98 THE NEW REVELATION 

honour, I think, to state our own belief, espe- 
cially to those who are in trouble. Having 
stated it, we should not force it, but leave the 
rest to higher wisdom than our own. We 
wish to subvert no religion. We wish only 
to bring back the material-minded — to take 
them out of their cramped valley and put 
them on the ridge, whence they can breathe 
purer air and see other valleys and other 
ridges beyond. Eeligions are mostly petri- 
fied and decayed, overgrown with forms and 
choked with mysteries. We can prove that 
there is no need for this. All that is essen- 
tial is both very simple and very sure. 

The clear call for our help comes from 
those who have had a loss and who yearn to 
re-establish connection. This also can be 
overdone. If your boy were in Australia, 
you would not expect him to continually stop 
his work and write long letters at all sea- 
sons. Having got in touch, be moderate in 
your demands. Do not be satisfied with any 
evidence short of the best, but having got 
that, you can, it seems to me, wait for that 
short period when we shall all be re-united. 
I am in touch at present with thirteen moth- 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 99 

ers who are in correspondence with their 
dead sons. In each case, the husband, where 
he is alive, is agreed as to the evidence. In 
only one case so far as I know was the parent 
acquainted with psychic matters before the 
war. 

Several of these cases have peculiarities 
of their own. In two of them the figures 
of the dead lads have appeared beside the 
mothers in a photograph. In one case the 
first message to the mother came through a 
stranger to whom the correct address of 
the mother was given. The communication 
afterwards became direct. In another case 
the method of sending messages was to give 
references to particular pages and lines of 
books in distant libraries, the whole con- 
veying a message. The procedure was to 
weed out all fear of telepathy. Yerily there 
is no possible way by which a truth can be 
proved by which this truth has not been 
proved. 

How are you to act? There is the diffi- 
culty. There are true men and there are 
frauds. You have to work warily. So far 
as professional mediums go, you will not 



100 THE NEW REVELATION 

find it difficult to get recommendations* 
Even with the best you may draw entirely 
blank. The conditions are very elusive. 
And yet some get the result at once. We 
cannot lay down laws, because the law works 
from the other side as well as this. Nearly 
every woman is an undeveloped medium. 
Let her try her own powers of automatic 
writing. There again, what is done must be 
done with every precaution against self- 
deception, and in a reverent and prayerful 
mood. But if you are earnest, you will win 
through somehow, for someone else is prob- 
ably trying on the other side. 

Some people discountenance communica- 
tion upon the ground that it is hindering the 
advance of the departed. There is not a 
little of evidence for this. The assertions 
of the spirits are entirely to the contrary 
and they declare that they are helped and 
strengthened by the touch with those whom 
they love. I know few more moving pas- 
sages in their simple boyish eloquence than 
those in which Eaymond describes the feel- 
ings of the dead boys who want to get mes- 
sages back to their people and find that ig- 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 101 

norance and prejudice are a perpetual bar. 
"It is hard to think your sons are dead, but 
such a lot of people do think so. It is re- 
volting to hear the boys tell you how no one 
speaks of them ever. It hurts me through 
and through." 

Above all read the literature of this sub- 
ject. It has been far too much neglected, 
not only by the material world but by be- 
lievers. Soak yourself with this grand 
truth. Make yourself familiar with the 
overpowering evidence. Get away from the 
phenomenal side and learn the lofty teach- 
ing from such beautiful books as After 
Death or from Stainton Moses ' Spirit 
Teachings. There is a whole library of such 
literature, of unequal value but of a high 
average. Broaden and spiritualize your 
thoughts. Show the results in your lives. 
Unselfishness, that is the keynote to prog- 
ress. Eealise not as a belief or a faith, but 
as a fact which is as tangible as the streets of 
London, that we are moving on soon to an- 
other life, that all will be very happy there, 
and that the only possible way in which that 
happiness can be marred or deferred is by 



102 THE NEW REVELATION 

folly and selfishness in these few fleeting 
years. 

It must be repeated that while the new 
revelation may seem destructive to those 
who hold Christian dogmas with extreme 
rigidity, it has quite the opposite effect upon 
the mind which, like so many modern minds, 
had come to look upon the whole Christian 
scheme as a huge delusion. It is shown 
clearly that the old revelation has so many 
resemblances, defaced by time and mangled 
by man's mishandling and materialism, but 
still denoting the same general scheme, that 
undoubtedly both have come from the same 
source. The accepted ideas of life after 
death, of higher and lower spirits, of com- 
parative happiness depending upon our own 
conduct, of chastening by pain, of guardian 
spirits, of high teachers, of an infinite cen- 
tral power, of circles above circles approach- 
ing nearer to His presence — all of these con- 
ceptions appear once more and are confirmed 
by many witnesses. It is only the claims of 
infallibility and of monopoly, the bigotry 
and pedantry of theologians, and the man- 
made rituals which take the life out of the 



PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS 103 

God-given thoughts — it is only this which 
has defaced the truth. 

I cannot end this little book better than by 
using words more eloquent than any which 
I could write, a splendid sample of English 
style as well as of English thought. They 
are from the pen of that considerable 
thinker and poet, Mr. Gerald Massey, and 
were written many years ago. 

"Spiritualism has been for me, in com- 
mon with many others, such as lifting of 
the mental horizon and letting-in of the 
heavens — such a formation of faith into 
facts, that I can only compare life with- 
out it to sailing on board ship with hatches 
battened down and being kept a prisoner, 
living by the light of a candle, and then 
suddenly, on some splendid starry night, 
allowed to go on deck for the first time to 
see the stupendous mechanism of the 
heavens all aglow with the glory of God." 



SUPPLEMENTAEY DOCUMENTS 



I 

THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE 

I have spoken in the text of the striking 
manner in which accounts of life in the next 
phase, though derived from the most varied 
and independent sources, are still in essen- 
tial agreement — an agreement which occa- 
sionally descends to small details. A vari- 
ety is introduced by that fuller vision which 
can see and describe more than one plane, 
but the accounts of that happy land to which 
the ordinary mortal may hope to aspire, are 
very consistent. Since I wrote the state- 
ment I have read three fresh independent 
descriptions which again confirm the point. 
One is the account given by "A King's Coun- 
sel," in his recent book, I Heard a Voice 
(Kegan Paul), which I recommended to in- 
quirers, though it has a strong Roman 
Catholic bias running through it which 
shows that our main lines of thought 
are persistent. A second is the little book 

107 



108 THE NEW REVELATION 

The Light on the Future, giving the 
very interesting details of the beyond, 
gathered by an earnest and reverent circle 
in Dublin. The other came in a private 
letter from Mr. Hubert Wales, and is, I 
think, most instructive. Mr. Wales is a 
cautious and rather sceptical inquirer who 
had put away his results with incredulity 
(he had received them through his own auto- 
matic writing). On reading my account of 
the conditions described in the beyond, he 
hunted up his own old script which had 
commended itself so little to him when he 
first produced it. He says: " After read- 
ing your article, I was struck, almost star- 
tled, by the circumstance that the statements 
which had purported to be made to me re- 
garding conditions after death coincided — 
I think almost to the smallest detail — with 
those you set out as the result of your colla- 
tion of material obtained from a great num- 
ber of sources. I cannot think there was 
anything in my antecedent reading to ac- 
count for this coincidence. I had certainly 
read nothing you had published on the sub- 
ject. I had purposely avoided Raymond 



THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE 109 

and books like it, in order not to vitiate my 
own results, and the Proceedings of the 
S.P.R. which I had read at that time, do 
not touch, as you know, upon after-death 
conditions. At any rate I obtained, at vari- 
ous times, statements (as my contemporary 
notes show) to the effect that, in this per- 
sisting state of existence, they have bodies 
which, though imperceptible by our senses, 
are as solid to them as ours to us, that these 
bodies are based on the general characteris- 
tics of our present bodies but beautified ; that 
they have no age, no pain, no rich and poor ; 
that they wear clothes and take nourish- 
ment; that they do not sleep (though they 
spoke of passing occasionally into a semi- 
conscious state which they called ' lying 
asleep ' — a condition, it just occurs to me, 
which seems to correspond roughly with the 
'Hypnoidal' state) ; that, after a period 
which is usually shorter than the average 
life-time here, they pass to some further 
state of existence; that people of similar 
thoughts, tastes and feelings, gravitate to- 
gether; that married couples do not neces- 
sarily reunite, but that the love of man and 



110 THE NEW REVELATION 

woman continues and is freed of elements 
which with us often militate against its per- 
fect realization; that immediately after 
death people pass into a semi-conscious rest- 
state lasting various periods, that they are 
unable to experience bodily pain, but are 
susceptible at times to some mental anxiety; 
that a painful death is ' absolutely un- 
known,' that religious beliefs make no dif- 
ference whatever in the after-state, and that 
their life altogether is intensely happy, and 
no one having ever realised it could wish to 
return here. I got no reference to 'work' 
by that word, but much to the various inter- 
ests that were said to occupy them. That 
is probably only another way of saying the 
same thing. 'Work' with us has come usu- 
ally to mean 'work to live,' and that, I was 
emphatically informed, was not the case with 
them — that all the requirements of life were 
somehow mysteriously 'provided.' Neither 
did I get any reference to a definite 'tem- 
porary penal state,' but I gathered that 
people begin there at the point of intellectual 
and moral development where they leave off 
here; and since their state of happiness was 



THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE 111 

based mainly upon sympathy, those who 
came over in a low moral condition, failed 
at first for various lengths of time to have 
the capacity to appreciate and enjoy it." 



II 

AUTOMATIC WRITING 

This form of mediunisliip gives the very 
highest results, and yet in its very nature is 
liable to self -deception. Are we using our 
own hand or is an outside power directing 
it? It is only by the information received 
that we can tell, and even then we have to 
make broad allowance for the action of our 
own subconscious knowledge. It is worth 
while perhaps to quote what appears to me 
to be a thoroughly critic-proof case, so that 
the inquirer may see how strong the evidence 
is that these messages are not self -evolved. 
This case is quoted in Mr. Arthur Hill's re- 
cent book Man Is a Spirit (Cassell & Co.) 
and is contributed by a gentleman who takes 
the name of Captain James Burton. He is, 
I understand, the same medium (amateur) 
through whose communications the position 

of the buried ruins at Glastonbury have re- 

112 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 113 

cently been located. "A week after my 
father's funeral I was writing a business 
letter, when something seemed to intervene 
between my hand and the motor centres of 
my brain, and the hand wrote at an amazing 
rate a letter, signed with my father's sig- 
nature and purporting to come from him. 
I was upset, and my right side and arm be- 
came cold and numb. For a year after this 
letters came frequently, and always at unex- 
pected times. I never knew what they con- 
tained until I examined them with a mag- 
nif ying-glass : they were microscopic. And 
they contained a vast amount of matter with 
which it was impossible for me to be ac- 
quainted." . . . " Unknown to me, my 
mother, who was staying some sixty miles 
away, lost her pet dog, which my father had 
given her. The same night I had a letter 
from him condoling with her, and stating 
that the dog was now with him. ' All things 
which love us and are necessary to our hap- 
piness in the world are with us here. 9 A 
most sacred secret, known to no one but my 
father and mother, concerning a matter 
which occurred years before I was born, 



114 THE NEW REVELATION 

was afterwards told rne in the script, with 
the comment: 'Tell your mother this, and 
she will know that it is I, your father, who 
am writing.' My mother had been unable 
to accept the possibility up to now, but when 
I told her this she collapsed and fainted. 
From that moment the letters became her 
greatest comfort, for they were lovers dur- 
ing the forty years of their married life, and 
his death almost broke her heart. 

" As for myself, I am as convinced that my 
father, in his original personality, still ex- 
ists, as if he were still in his study with the 
door shut. He is no more dead than he 
would be were he living in America. 

"I have compared the diction and vocabu- 
ulary of these letters with those employed in 
my own writing — I am not unknown as a 
magazine contributor — and I find no points 
of similarity between the two." There is 
much further evidence in this case for which 
I refer the reader to the book itself. 



Ill 

THE CHEKITON DUGOUT 

I have mentioned in the text that I had 
some recent experience of a case where a 
"polter-geist" or mischievous spirit had 
been manifesting. These entities appear to 
be of an undeveloped order and nearer to 
earth conditions than any others with which 
we are acquainted. This comparative ma- 
terialism upon their part places them low in 
the scale of spirit, and undesirable perhaps 
as communicants, but it gives them a special 
value as calling attention to crude obvious 
phenomena, and so arresting the human at- 
tention and forcing upon our notice that 
there are other forms of life within the uni- 
verse. These borderland forces have at- 
tracted passing attention at several times 
and places in the past, such cases as the 
Wesley persecution at Epworth, the Drum- 

115 



116 THE NEW REVELATION 

mer of Tedworth, the Bells of Bealing, etc., 
startling the country for a time — each of 
them being an impingement of unknown 
forces upon human life. Then almost 
simultaneously came the Hydesville case in 
America and the Cideville disturbances in 
France, which were so marked that they 
could not be overlooked. From them sprang 
the whole modern movement which, reason- 
ing upwards from small things to great, from 
raw things to developed ones, from phenom- 
ena to messages, is destined to give religion 
the firmest basis upon which it has ever 
stood. Therefore, humble and foolish as 
these manifestations may seem, they have 
been the seed of large developments, and are 
worthy of our respectful, though critical, at- 
tention. 

Many such manifestations have appeared 
of recent years in various quarters of the 
world, each of which is treated by the press 
in a more or less comic vein, with a convic- 
tion apparently that the use of the word 
" spook" discredits the incident and brings 
discussion to an end. It is remarkable that 
each is treated as an entirely isolated phe- 



THE CHERITON DUGOUT 117 

nomenon, and thus the ordinary reader gets 
no idea of the strength of the cumulative evi- 
dence. In this particular case of the Cheri- 
ton Dugout the facts are as follows : 

Mr. Jaques, a Justice of the Peace and a 
man of education and intelligence, residing 
at Embrook House, Cheriton, near Folke- 
stone, made a dugout just opposite to his 
residence as a protection against air raids. 
The house was, it may be remarked, of great 
antiquity, part of it being an old religious 
foundation of the 14th Century. The dug- 
out was constructed at the base of a small 
bluff, and the sinking was through ordinary 
soft sandstone. The work was carried out 
by a local jobbing builder called Rolfe, as- 
sisted by a lad. Soon after the inception of 
his task he was annoyed by his candle being 
continually blown out by jets of sand, and 
by similar jets hitting up against his own 
face. These phenomena he imagined to be 
due to some gaseous or electrical cause, but 
they reached such a point that his work was 
seriously hampered, and he complained to 
Mr. Jaques, who received the story with ab- 
solute incredulity. The persecution con- 



118 THE NEW REVELATION 

tinued, however, and increased in intensity, 
taking the form now of actual blows from 
moving material, considerable objects, such 
as stones and bits of brick, flying past him 
and hitting the walls with a violent impact. 
Mr. Eolfe, still searching for a physical ex- 
planation, went to Mr. Hesketh, the Munici- 
pal Electrician of Folkestone, a man of high 
education and intelligence, who went out to 
the scene of the affair and saw enough to con- 
vince himself that the phenomena were per- 
fectly genuine and inexplicable by ordinary 
laws. A Canadian soldier who was billeted 
upon Mr. Eolfe, heard an account of the hap- 
penings from his host, and after announcing 
his conviction that the latter had "bats in his 
belfry' ' proceeded to the dugout, where his 
experiences were so instant and so violent 
that he rushed out of the place in horror. 
The housekeeper at the Hall also was a wit- 
ness of the movement of bricks when no 
human hands touched them. Mr. Jaques, 
whose incredulity had gradually thawed be- 
fore all this evidence, went down to the dug- 
out in the absence of everyone, and was de- 
parting from it when five stones rapped up 



THE CHERITON DUGOUT 119 

against the door from the inside. He re- 
opened the door and saw them lying there 
upon the floor. Sir William Barrett had 
meanwhile come down, but had seen nothing. 
His stay was a short one. I afterwards 
made four visits of about two hours each to 
the grotto, but got nothing direct, though I 
saw the new brickwork all chipped about by 
the blows which it had received. The forces 
appeared to have not the slightest interest in 
psychical research, for they never played up 
to an investigator, and yet their presence 
and action have been demonstrated to at 
least seven different observers, and, as I have 
said, they left their traces behind them, even 
to the extent of picking the flint stones out 
of the new cement whichrwas to form the 
floor, and arranging them in tidy little piles. 
The obvious explanation that the boy was 
an adept at mischief had to be set aside in 
view of the fact that the phenomena occurred 
in his absences One extra man of science 
wandered on to the scene for a moment, but 
as his explanation was that the movements 
occurred through the emanation of marsh- 
gas, it did not advance matters much. The 



/ 



120 THE NEW REVELATION 

disturbances are still proceeding, and I have 
had a letter this very morning (February 
21st, 1918) with fuller and later details from 
Mr. Hesketh, the Engineer. 

What is the real explanation of such a 
matter ? I can only say that I have advised 
Mr. Jaques to dig into the bluff under which 
he is constructing his cellar. I made some 
investigation myself upon the top of it and 
convinced myself that the surface ground at 
that spot has at some time been disturbed 
to the depth of at least five feet. Something 
has, I should judge, been buried at some date, 
and it is probable that, as in the case cited 
in the text, there is a connection between this 
and the disturbances. It is very probable 
that Mr. Rolfe is, unknown to himself, a 
physical medium, and that when he was in 
the confined space of the cellar he turned 
it into a cabinet in which his magnetic pow- 
ers could accumulate and be available for 
use. It chanced that there was on the spot 
some agency which chose to use them, and 
hence the phenomena. When Mr. Jaques 
went alone to the grotto the power left be- 
hind by Mr. Eolf e, who had been in it all 



THE CHERITON DUGOUT 121 

morning, was not yet exhausted and he was 
able to get some manifestations. So I read 
it, but it is well not to be dogmatic on such 
matters. If there is systematic digging I 
should expect an epilogue to the story. 

Whilst these proofs were in the press a 
second very marked case of a Polter-geist 
came within my knowledge. I cannot with- 
out breach of confidence reveal the details 
and the phenomena are still going on. Curi- 
ously enough, it was because one of the suf- 
ferers from the invasion read some remarks 
of mine upon the Cheriton dugout that this 
other case came to my knowledge, for the 
lady wrote to me at once for advice and as- 
sistance. The place is remote and I have 
not yet been able to visit it, but from the full 
accounts which I have now received it seems 
to present all the familiar features, with the 
phenomenon of direct writing superadded. 
Some specimens of this script have reached 
me. Two clergymen have endeavoured to 
mitigate the phenomena, which are occasion- 
ally very violent, but so far without result. 
It may be some consolation to any others 
who may be suffering from this strange in- 



122 THE NEW REVELATION 

fliction, to know that in the many cases which 
have been carefully recorded there is none in 
which any physical harm has been inflicted 
upon man or beast. 












-tu 


















■■: 



15. 









s ' 




























*> 

.# 



^ ^ 






<S>°* 






xf> 6 















L> 






oo 



^ 



,-1 



7", 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 






Tfe.SS<LSTTQOO 




SS3M0N03 JO AUV»eil 



Hi 



Mil 



